Boon Island: including Contemporary Accounts of the Wreck of the Nottingham Galley

by Kenneth Roberts

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  "What makes him like that?" I asked Captain Dean.

  He shrugged his shoulders. "Who knows? The world is full of Langmans, believing in all sorts of worthless tarradiddle, but dondemning things that might help mankind. Newton's a case in point. He's shown the world something new and valuable, so the ignorant attack him. Like all ignorant people, they're stubborn about it, and angry for fear they may have to eat their words. The Langmans always refuse to look through the telescope."

  "Maybe so," I said, "but if I were captain of this ship, I'd make Langman keep a civil tongue in his head."

  "Well, you aren't captain, Miles," Captain Dean said, "and to be frank about it, I wish I weren't. I'm captain to please my brother Jasper. I'd rather be of some service to my country in foreign partsin America: Holland: Sweden, where I wouldn't be dealing day and night with sailors, who're forever seeing sea-serpents or the Flying Dutchman or privateers, and condemning everything decent like Isaac Newton or the reading of books."

  He eyed me quizzically. "How would you make Langman keep a civil tongue in his head, Miles?"

  "With a belaying pin, if I had to."

  Captain Dean shook his head. "No, Miles. That wouldn't do. There's two ways of running a ship. One's by violence. The other's by letting the men think they're being consulted. I can't use violence, Miles, because I don't like violence. I'm afraid of it. I'm strong, and if I hit any man on this ship, I'd put my heart in it and wouldn't be able to keep my mind on my work for fear he'd be hurtkilled, maybe. Besides, Miles, we're shorthanded. A galley, by rights, should have a crew of twenty-five. We have fourteen, including you and me. I can't leave the quarter-deck

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  to hand sails, and I can't risk losing a man for any reason. Don't expect heroics out of me, Miles. I'm just an ordinary individual, who has to go to the head like everyone else, makes mistakes like all the rest of the world, and is mighty glad he doesn't have to be burdened with listening to as many damned fools as surrounded Oliver Cromwell or Charles II."

  On the seventh of August two sloops of war made signals indicating that they would convoy all merchant vessels wishing to proceed to northern Scotland or northern Ireland, and we soon learned that Captain Dean was right about the sailing qualities of the twelve vessels that moved off to the eastward to cluster around the sloops of war like fat goslings between two proud parent geese. They were slow, and by the time we had rounded the bulge of Norfolk and borne up into the North Sea, Captain Dean was in as much of a frenzy as a man so placid could be. His irritation was understandable, because in order to sail as slowly as the other tubs in the convoy, we carried nothing except topsails and headsails.

  By the time we had reached the latitude of the north riding of York, with Whitby off our larboard beam, he sniffed the warm west breeze and could stand it no longer. "Get the rest of the sails on her, Mr. Langman," he shouted. "We've been five days coming this far, and alone we could have done it in two. Crowd on the canvas. We'll have this convoy hull-down by midafternoon, and be off the Orkneys tomorrow, sure as shooting."

  Langman seemed horrified. "What do you want to do," he demanded, "throw this vessel away? What'll you do if you run into a privateer?"

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  "Do?" Captain Dean asked. "Why, I'll do what any sailor'd do. I'll run from her. Before I ran, though, I'd want to make sure she was a privateer. One thing I learned long ago, Mr. Langman, is that nearly every time a sailor-man thinks he sees a Black Flag, it turns out to be the captain's overcoat hung up to dry. Get those sails on her."

  "The men won't like it," Langman protested.

  "You mean Mellen and White won't like it," the captain said. "They won't if you tell them not to, so don't tell 'em. A few days ago you were howling we shouldn't sail because of not having enough water: now you're screaming we oughtn't to make a run for Killybegs, where there's plenty of fine water to be had. Get on with those sails."

  That was the beginning of an oft-renewed argument between Langman and Captain Deanan argument that came to one of its many heads when we did in fact round the northern tip of Scotland, slip through the narrow waters between the mainland and the Hebrides, swiftly skirt the north of Ireland and start down toward the Isle of Aran and Donegal Bay.

  We were still short of Aran by a few miles when the lookout sighted two vessels in a bay near the tip of Aran. As soon as Langman heard the word, he went halfway up the mizzen ratlins to see for himself: then called down to Mellen and White.

  "Privateers," he bawled. He came down the ratlins like a squirrel and ran to the quarter-deck. "Those are privateers," he told the captain. "All the men say so."

  "What do the men know about it?" Captain Dean asked. "I know, and they probably don't, that Donegal Bay is full of British naval vessels and fishermen. This is no place for French privateers."

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  "I say they're privateers," Langman said. "I can tell by the cut of their jibs."

  A voice reached us from the waist. "He wants us to be captured."

  "Hear that?" Langman demanded. "That's what they're all saying: you want to be captured by a privateer."

  "That's the silliest thing I ever heard," Captain Dean said. "Why in God's name would I want to be captured by a Frenchman?"

  "You wouldn't act the way you're actingyou wouldn't run towards two privateersunless you wanted to be taken."

  "Look here," Captain Dean said. "This ship cost money, as you well know. So did the cordage we're carrying. We're within a few hours of a port where we'll take on another expensive cargo. I'd be the last one to run risks with this ship."

  Langman was supercilious. "You insured the cordage, didn't you?"

  "Of course I did," Captain Dean said. "Only a fool would fail to insure his cargo."

  "Well," Langman persisted, "if you turned the ship over to a privateer, your brother Jasper'd get the insurance money, wouldn't he?"

  "Certainly he would," Captain Dean said. "Also, all of us, including me and my brother Henry, would land in a French prison. If I thought I was in danger of being captured, I'd run the ship ashore."

  Langman wouldn't stop worrying the subject. "If you did run her ashore, both you and your brother would get the money."

  Captain Dean turned away from him and took the wheel

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  from Harry Hallion. "Harry," he said, "go forward and tell the men we're running between Aran and the main, and that we'll neither abandon this ship nor let any Frenchman have her."

  Hallion went forward and spoke to White and Mellen, the two bos'ns. At his words both Mellen and White burst into derisive laughter.

  "This has gone far enough," Captain Dean said. "Take the wheel, Miles! Keep her steady as she goes."

  He ran from the quarter-deck to the waist, stepping in front of Mellen and White, who stared sullenly at the deck.

  "What are you damned fools preaching to these men?" Captain Dean demanded.

  Mellen gave him a sullen answer. "We're not preaching anything. We just don't propose to be turned over to the damned French."

  "Do you know what you're saying?" Captain Dean said. "You're implying I'm a traitor."

  When neither Mellen nor White answered, Captain Dean's two big hands shot out, seized them by the collars of their jackets and banged their heads together so that the sound came clearly to us on the quarter-deck. "I'll have common sense on this ship, and not a lot of buccaneery blathering about things you don't understand! Such as privateers! Such as insurance!" He threw them to the deck between two of the guns.

  He didn't like violence, he had told me, and he had meant it. Both White and Mellen were able to get to their feet. The cracking together of their heads had been no more violent than the caning a schoolmaster gives a boy for writing

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  verses on the wall of a privy. If the captain had treated them with the violence their conduct deserved, their skulls would have cracked like plover eggs.

  It was easy to see that La
ngman, Mellen and White had conspired together. They used the same words: the same impossible false arguments, and I, like a fool, still couldn't understand why. I thought they behaved as they did because they were wrong-headed. God only knows why so many humans are afflicted with that terrible disease, or failing, or whatever it is; but I did know that wrong-headed men are responsible for nearly all the world's troubles; and so I thought Langman, Mellen and White were wrong-headed because they couldn't help themselves.

  The captain had been right all the time, for the two ships paid no more attention to us than as though we'd been a fishing schooner. We ran safely through the strait that separates Aran from the main, and next day, August 13th, we rounded the red cliffs at the northern entrance of Donegal Bay. By nightfall we were anchored in the snug harbor of Killybegs, surrounded by the greenest hills I ever hope to see. On the slopes of all the hills were black and white cattle on whose milk and cream and butter, which even Cooky Sipper couldn't spoil, we lived in luxury.

  We lay in the harbor of Killybegs for six weeks, not from choice, but because Captain Dean said we had to wait for cool weather before loading a thousand firkins of butter and the three hundred cheeses which he proposed to sell to the citizens of Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Otherwise both cheese and butter might spoil.

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  Portsmouth people, Captain Dean claimed, were the best people in the worldthe kindest, the most hospitable, the most generous, the most appreciative, the most civilized of any people anywhere in America and he'd run no risk of offering them rancid butter.

  England, he said, except for its Langmans and gipsies, its beggars and whores, its thieves, snobs, toadies, fops, rakes, gambling schemes, press gangs, wasn't half bad; but if it weren't for his brother Jasper and his obligation to sail ships in accordance with Jasper's plans, he would get himself a home in Portsmouth.

  "Sometimes," he said in his solid, mild way, "I think Englishmen are all a pack of bastards; but Portsmouth people aren't. They don't think the way we do. It's something about the climate, probably. Those who can stand it have something happen to them. Even the lobsters grow two big claws."

  For the first time since that terrible twenty-ninth of July, Neal Butler's smile came back to him in Killybegs. When he finished his copying of The Seaman's Secrets, Captain Dean set him to drawing the coast line of America from a worn Mercator's Projection, starting with Cape Sable in Nova Scotia and working as far south as New York.

  Perhaps the prospect of America helped Neal to forget the happenings of July 29th: perhaps the scents and the sights and the soundsthe calmness and remotenessof that placid pretty harbor of Killybegs started him talking to the captain about fish. But talk he did, and soon, with the captain's permission, he and Swede were thick as porridge with a dozen fishermen, so that they knew where to go to fish, and kept the galley well supplied.

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  Soon, too, except for one thing, he was himself again. When he wasn't running errands for Captain Dean and cleaning our cabins, or carefully laying off the American coast in his notebook, he was helping Swede scale the guns, or learning the care and the use of a plane and an adze from Chips Bullock, giving him a hand at knocking together the water casks; or he was in the galley, peering at the messes Cooky Sipper concocted.

  Yes, he was himself again except for just one thing. Heve wouldn't talk about the theatre or anything that had happened to him during his life in Greenwich. Swede and Captain Dean and I knew why this was, and were careful to make no reference to matters that Neal with good reason found painful. But not Langman. I'll never forget the glittering September morning when Neal was stowing fishing tackle in the Nottingham's small tender, and Langman stood at the top of the ladder, looking down at him with that derisive half-smile of his. Just what Langman said, we on the quarter-deck couldn't distinguish; but we heard him mockingly call Neal "Whitebait."

  Captain Dean and I simultaneously started for Langman; but though we were quick, we were too slow. Swede, darting from the after-cabin, swung his long right arm scythe-like at Langman. Langman rose a little to fall across the top of the bulwarks, his arms flailing, hung there a moment; then rolled over and into the harbor with a gratifying splash.

  Neal, ironically enough, gaffed him and pulled him out; and as Langman mounted the ladder to stand dripping on the ladder grating, Captain Dean eyed him impassively and told him to be more careful of his footing.

  For once Langman, as his glance went from Captain

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  Dean's face to Swede's and mine, looked apprehensive, and he set off for the fo'cs'l without his usual disdainful reply. Neal, I was sure, would be free of Langman's attentions for some time to come.

  The last of sixty thousand pounds of the best Donegal butter, all packed in firkins, and three hundred Donegal cheeses had come aboard when we set sail on September 25th on a voyage that for devilishness was enough to make me wonder again and again why any man went to sea of his own free will.

  During all the time the Nottingham sailed the great circle, we saw nothing but mountainous wavesran into winds so contrary that we spent more time blundering backward than we did wallowing forward. The men, forever shortening sail, making sail, battening everything down to ride out storms that seemed to have no ending, manning the pumps, were constantly complaining, and like all men everywhere, they blamed their misfortunes on Captain Dean until I marveled at his patience.

  Our water casks sprung leaks so that we had to go on short rations: our beef turned sour.

  October was a villainous cold month: November was worse; and in December the sun apparently disappeared for good in a gurry of fog and dirty gray clouds.

  Early in December we sighted a shipthe only sail we sighted in all that timeand spoke her, at which Langman set up his now familiar squealing that she was a French privateer.

  She proved to be the ship Pompey, London bound, and her captain told us only two things: that we were off the Banks of Newfoundland, and that the weather where he'd

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  come from was worse than what we'd had, no matter how bad that had been.

  On Monday, December 4th, we caught a glimpse of Cape Sable in Nova Scotia. Then the weather turned dirtier than ever.

  ''We could make Portsmouth in a day," Captain Dean told us, "but I've got to see the sun just once before I take any chances."

  So we stood off and on, and a week passed before we saw the sun.

  The wind was frigid and bitter, and in the northeast, and the seas kicked up by that northeast gale seemed to run at us from every direction, instead of from the northeast. The waves, too, were dirty and gray, as if they'd gone down deep and dredged up all the sand and seaweed from the bottom.

  I well remember that Monday morning when we finally caught sight of the sun. Usually a glimpse of it after a northeast blow, Captain Dean said, meant that we'd have a little decent weather. Instead of that, the sun stayed out just long enough for us to stand in toward the land and sight the long, low coast line of New England, with tree-covered points thrust out toward us, and all the ledges and hills covered with snow.

  Captain Dean was elated. "That's Cape Porpoise," he said. "Now I know exactly where we are. We'll head due south, and we'll be in Portsmouth tomorrow morning."

  He'd no sooner spoken than the sun disappeared again behind a driving wall of snow.

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  December 11th, Monday

  I remember that day for other things. Our food, bad to begin with, had become steadily worse; and on that morning of December 11th there was none at all. Cooky Sipper, Langman told the captain, was sick, with a throat so full of phlegm that he could hardly swallow, and none of the other men knew how to cook.